English

COZMIC. I. Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations with Initial Conditions Beyond Cold Dark Matter

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-06-17 v3 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present 72 cosmological dark matter-only NN-body zoom-in simulations with initial conditions beyond cold, collisionless dark matter (CDM), as the first installment of the COZMIC suite. We simulate Milky Way (MW) analogs with linear matter power spectra P(k)P(k) for i) thermal-relic warm dark matter (WDM) with masses mWDM[3,4,5,6,6.5,10] keVm_{\mathrm{WDM}}\in [3,4,5,6,6.5,10]~\mathrm{keV}, ii) fuzzy dark matter (FDM) with masses mFDM[25.9,69.4,113,151,185,490]×1022 eVm_{\mathrm{FDM}}\in [25.9,69.4,113,151,185,490]\times 10^{-22}~\mathrm{eV}, and iii) interacting dark matter (IDM) with a velocity-dependent elastic proton scattering cross section σ=σ0vn\sigma=\sigma_0 v^n relative particle velocity scaling n[2,4]n\in [2,4], and dark matter mass mIDM[104, 102, 1]m_{\mathrm{IDM}}\in[10^{-4},~ 10^{-2},~ 1] GeV. Subhalo mass function (SHMF) suppression is significantly steeper in FDM versus WDM, while dark acoustic oscillations in P(k)P(k) can reduce SHMF suppression for IDM. We fit SHMF models to our simulation results and derive new bounds on WDM and FDM from the MW satellite population, obtaining mWDM>5.9 keVm_{\mathrm{WDM}}>5.9~\mathrm{keV} and mFDM>1.4×1020 eVm_{\mathrm{FDM}}>1.4\times 10^{-20}~\mathrm{eV} at 95%95\% confidence; these limits are 10%\approx 10\% weaker and 5×5\times stronger than previous constraints owing to the updated transfer functions and SHMF models, respectively. We estimate IDM bounds for n=2n=2 (n=4n=4) and obtain σ0<1.0×1027\sigma_0 < 1.0\times 10^{-27}, 1.3×10241.3\times 10^{-24}, and 3.1×1023 cm23.1\times 10^{-23}~\mathrm{cm}^2 (σ0<9.9×1027\sigma_0 < 9.9\times 10^{-27}, 9.8×10219.8\times 10^{-21}, and 2.1×1017 cm22.1\times 10^{-17}~\mathrm{cm}^2) for mIDM=104m_{\mathrm{IDM}}=10^{-4}, 10210^{-2}, and 11 GeV, respectively. Thus, future development of IDM SHMF models can improve IDM cross section bounds by up to a factor of 20\sim 20 with current data. COZMIC presents an important step toward accurate small-scale structure modeling in beyond-CDM cosmologies, critical to upcoming observational searches for dark matter physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.03635,
  title  = {COZMIC. I. Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations with Initial Conditions Beyond Cold Dark Matter},
  author = {Ethan O. Nadler and Rui An and Vera Gluscevic and Andrew Benson and Xiaolong Du},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.03635},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

36 pages, 19 figures, 2 tables; updated to published version. Data is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14649137